The first cross-platform IDE from Microsoft

May 1, 2015 02:30 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft had the pleasure of announcing the Preview of its Visual Studio Code tool for Linux, OS X, and Windows operating systems during the BUILD 2015 event that took place on April 29, 2015.

According to Microsoft, Visual Studio Code aims to be a powerful and streamlined IDE that lets developers build and debug modern, platform-independent Web and Cloud applications, as well as develop Node and ASP.NET apps.

As stated on the application's website, Visual Studio Code eliminates the need for a complete Integrated Development Environment by combining rich code assistance and navigation with a streamlined user interface found on modern editors and an integrated debugging experience.

Visual Studio Code does not require installation

We were curious to see what's all the fuss about, so we took the Visual Studio Code application for a test drive on our Ubuntu 15.04 (Vivid Vervet) machine. The program is currently distributed as a ZIP archive that does not require installation.

After extracting the ZIP package, you'll see a new folder that has the same name as the archive. To start Visual Studio Code on your Linux box, open the extracted folder and double-click the "Code" executable file.

The first thing you notice when opening Visual Studio Code is that the software uses a sleek dark theme, which is quite useful for developers who spend numerous hours writing code and debugging their applications. A light theme is also available, and the welcome screen will help anyone get started in minutes.

Automatically recognizes programming languages and integrates with Git

As with any respectable IDE application, Visual Studio Code automatically recognizes the programming language in which a given file is written. It currently supports C++, C#, CSS, CoffeeScript, Clojure, Go, HTML, JSON, Lua, Objective-C, PHP, Perl, Python, R, Bash (Shell Script), SQL, Less, YAML, Markdown, Java, F#, JS, Ini, Batch, Clojure, Dockerfile, Handlebars, Makefile, Jade, PowerShell, Razor, Sass, TypeScript, Plain Text, and Visual Basic.

Git integration is provided in a dedicated section that can be accessed from the side pane. If you don't have Git installed, Visual Studio Code will warn you. Other features include a command palette, full-screen support, a dedicated goto function that lets you easily navigate between files, definitions, symbols, and lines of code, zoom, split editor, find and replace, keyboard shortcuts, and automatic saving of files.

It's free for download, but not open source

All in all, Visual Studio Code for Linux looks like a promising start of an Integrated Development Environment for building ASP.NET applications on Linux kernel-based operating systems. Of course, you can use it to develop anything you want, but some hardcore Linux devs will (most probably) prefer more powerful IDEs.

While not an open source application, Visual Studio Code is free and runs on all mainstream operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. It is available for download today as a pre-release version only for 64-bit (x86_64) systems.

Those of you who don't trust Microsoft and its proprietary apps should be aware of the fact that "When this tool crashes, we automatically collect crash dumps so we can figure out what went wrong. If you don’t want to send your crash dumps to Microsoft, don't install this tool."

Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 15.04 (4 Images)

Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu 15.04
Visual Studio Code settingsEditing a HTML file
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